A/N: I was listening to the song "One Last Breath" by Creed when this idea occurred to me. You can thank lizook for giving me the inspiration to turn it into what it is, and not taking it to dark twisty places like I had originally thought of doing. You can also thank SSJL for writing an awesome post-100 that made me want to write something of my own to fix the awkwardsauce between Booth and Brennan. Basically I'm just plugging for other people and not getting anywhere with this author's note, so I'm going to stop now and let you read. :) Enjoy, and let me know what you think!
Please come now, I think I'm falling
Holding onto what I think is safe
It seems I found the road to nowhere
And I'm trying to escape
I yelled back when I heard thunder
But I'm down to one last breath
And with it let me say, let me say
Hold me now
I'm six feet from the edge
And I'm thinking
Maybe six feet ain't so far down...
- One Last Breath, Creed
Brennan rested on the cool, rough concrete ledge, looking out at the cityscape. Beyond her block buildings rose and fell like jagged mountains, lighting the sky and obscuring the stars beyond. A humid but cool breeze blew through her hair, sinking through her sweater into her skin and giving her a chill. Even though summer was on its way the evenings were still moist and cool, especially this high up.
Below her she heard the rumble of little toy cars, so many of them even this late at night. She had no idea what time it was—it had been just shy of eleven when she got tired of sitting alone on her couch and climbed the several flights of stairs up to the rooftop, and once she had come up here time simply ceased to be. With no sun or visible stars to mark the movement of the earth, the very indicator of the concept of time we created, she had no way of knowing how long she had been up there. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. It could have been years. Regardless, there were many late-night travelers, and as she watched them she wondered to what they were going, or to whom. She wondered the same about herself.
This was where she belonged, up and far away from everything. From this vantage point she could watch the world pass, observing with a keen eye the way those small people below interacted with one another. It was what she was good at, what all of her undergraduate studies had trained her to do. Before she could specialize in forensics, she had to take surveys in all the foundations of anthropology—cultural, linguistic, archaeology, and biological. While biological anthropology quickly grabbed her as the most superior subfield, cultural did strike a chord with her somehow.
Her interpersonal skills had always been abysmal at best, so to find a framework in which she could interpret why people do what they do, what motivates them, and what changes them, was a comfort. In this way she could classify people's behaviors, catalogue and compare them across time and culture, watch the intricate way in which people build their lives around a society, and a society builds itself around people's lives, much in the way a spider weaves a delicate but sturdy web. If she had not chosen forensics, she might have chosen cultural anthropology—to submerge herself into the lives of others as an active observer, to shed herself and put on their lives like a chameleon, was in so many ways appealing.
The wind tangled her hair and she raked her fingers through it, twisting it around one of her fingers and resting it on her shoulder. She heard the door to the rooftop open, and before she could wonder who else would be in such an isolated place at such a late hour, she heard his voice.
"Bones? There you are." She turned and her brows ran together as she took in the sight of him, in jeans and a t-shirt, his favorite leather jacket open in the breeze. A plastic bag hung on his arm, the cheap generic kind with many THANK YOU's printed in red ink along the side, and she could already smell the fish sauce from a distance—Pad Thai. While previously this might have been a welcome comfort, it was now only an act that served to deepen her confusion.
"Why are you here?" she asked, not realizing how the words fell heavy from her mouth like lead weights until she had already said them. He frowned.
"Glad to see you too," he said. She sighed through her nose. "What are you doing up here anyway?"
"Just looking," she said. "What are you doing up here? I thought you had a date with Catherine tonight." She kept her tongue in check, resisting the urge to lace the stated question with derision. He shrugged.
"I did, but I canceled." He set the bag down on the ground by their feet and leaned against the chest-high wall that surrounded the edge of the building. It was abnormally high, so high that Brennan could only just rest her arms comfortably on it. This was apparently to deter any would-be jumpers, who would have a hard time crawling over it.
"Oh," was all she said. She didn't know whether or not to ask why, and not wanting to deepen the mire of awkwardness that they had recently sunk themselves into, she chose to keep her mouth shut.
"What about you? It's Saturday night, why aren't you out with Andrew?" He did not refrain from seasoning Hacker's name with just a hint of distaste.
"He asked if I wanted to go out, but I said no," she said.
"How come?" he asked. She pursed her lips lightly before answering.
"I don't think it's going to work out," she admitted. "I feel no sense of commitment to the relationship."
"Well you've only been dating for what, a few weeks? It takes time," Booth said. She shook her head.
"No. While I do find him intellectually stimulating and rather charming, there's something about him that I feel is… lacking." Because he's not you, the voice in the back of her head screamed, but she did not say it.
"Ooh," Booth said, an air of understanding about him. He grinned, and she suddenly understood what he had interpreted her statement to mean.
"No, no, I don't mean that he was sexually inadequate, not at all," she corrected. Booth's face fell a little. She then added, "I wouldn't know."
"Oh yeah?" he said, feeling significantly uplifted although trying not to show it. She looked away from him and down to the little toy people in little toy cars and shook her head.
"No," she repeated. "We didn't have sex. I never felt that connection."
"I thought it was all about the 'biological imperative'," Booth said, quoting her.
"I am human, Booth. I do consider more than the propagation of my genes on occasion," she said, in a way that almost sounded hurt. He immediately regretted having made the comment.
"Sorry. I didn't either," he offered. "Have sex with Catherine, I mean."
"Oh," she said, again not sure whether to ask why not or to just let it lie. The tension between them was almost physically painful, and sickening. She felt it in the pit of her stomach, a tearing sensation that ached, a powerful emptiness. It inhaled and exhaled; it sighed. So did she.
"I didn't feel it either," he continued, answering the question she had not posed. "The connection, you know? She was great, she is great I mean, but it's just not there."
"I suppose it's not going to work out between you, then?" she asked, and he shook his head, watching a bus stop and let off a lone passenger wearing a backpack and oversized headphones.
"Doesn't look that way," he said. "I think she already knows. When I canceled our date, I think she knew."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't be," he said. "It happens." There was silence between them, taut and heavy, as they both looked down and observed the increasingly empty streets. As the minutes passed, it seemed, fewer and fewer cars clogged the streets.
"You never answered my question," he finally said.
"What's that?"
"What are you doing up here? I asked you when I first got here, and you never answered."
"I told you, I'm just looking," she repeated.
"Just looking?" he said, a little unbelieving. She nodded.
"It's nice up here," she explained. "Quiet. I couldn't focus on my manuscript and was tired of staring at the wall." I was tired of missing you, that voice added, but she didn't vocalize that part either.
"It is kind of nice," he agreed. "But it's a little weird, watching people from so far off."
"I like it," she said. "I like to observe people from a distance. I seem to do better that way," she added at the end, and the way the corners of her mouth fell did not escape him.
"You're the one holding yourself at a distance, Temperance," he said quietly, neither of them looking at each other but both down at the street.
"I know," she said. "It's best for everyone," she said, in a voice that was almost pleading.
"How do you figure?" he asked. "What do you get by keeping yourself at arm's length from everyone? Look, I get it, I get that when you keep your distance it makes it hard for people to hurt you." He could see her frame stiffen as he said the words, and he knew he had hit a mark. "But how can you love anyone that way? How can anyone love you? God knows I want to, but if you don't let me, I can't." The suddenness and frankness of his words caught her off guard, and she turned to face him, her face making an expression that was difficult to pin. It wasn't sad, it wasn't confused, it wasn't hostile. It was all of those things, and none of them.
"I don't want to hurt you," was all she said when she finally brought herself to speak. He pushed off against the wall, taking a few angry steps away before turning and throwing his hands up in the air.
"So what do you think this is, then? You think this feels good? You think this doesn't hurt? What the hell are you trying to protect me from anyway?" She sunk her nails into the palm of her hand and chewed on the inside of her cheek, forcing herself to focus on the pain, and not to cry.
"You don't understand…"
"I would if you let me! Damn it, Temperance, there's nothing you can throw at me that could hurt worse than this. Nothing, I promise you that."
"What if you decide you don't love me after all?" she blurted out before she could stop herself. The words were between them as if they were visible, tangible things; as if they had just fallen out of her mouth onto the concrete. His mouth fell open slightly, his expression disbelieving.
"How could you think that I wouldn't love you?" he asked, and his anger had been quickly displaced by hurt. Hurt for her, and for him.
"You don't know, Booth," she said, pinching the corners of her eyes with her thumb and index finger but failing to stem the outburst of emotion that she had been trying to avoid. "You don't know if you can love me."
"I know I can love you," he insisted fiercely. "I know I can because I love you every day, damn it. I love you every single day, when I wake up and when I go to bed. There's nothing about me that doesn't love you, and nothing, nothing could change that. Nothing."
"You don't know that," she insisted, brushing her wet cheeks angrily with her fingers, having all but given up on trying not to cry. "You can think you love somebody, you can think you'll love them forever, but you don't know. You can't know."
"I can and I do," he said, taking several steps towards her. She took one back, but ran into the ledge wall behind her. His voice was softer now, and urgent, as if they were losing time. "I knew the day I met you, I knew it then. When you drove off in that cab in the rain, that love stopped me from walking into that pool hall, and I loved you more. When you told that little boy in the interrogation room about being in the foster care system and you gave him courage, I loved you more. When you didn't give in to Vince McVicar, when you told him you'd find the truth on your own, I loved you more. When I pulled you out of the sand—" His voice cracked, but he swallowed and continued. "—I loved you more."
"Booth…"
"When you took baby Andy into your arms and into your life, even though it scared the hell out of you, I loved you more," he continued, not letting her interrupt. "When you forgave your dad, when you forgave your brother, when you let yourself love them again, I loved you more. When you saved your dad at his trial, I loved you more, and I didn't even know it was possible. When you… when I was lying there after Pam shot me, and I couldn't… and I couldn't see anything, I saw you, and I loved you more. Even when you slapped me in the face at my funeral, I loved you more.
"Temperance, there is nothing you could ever throw at me that would make me love you less. Nothing. Even when we danced at your high school reunion, and you told me I couldn't love you, that didn't stop me—I loved you more. I love you more now than I ever have, and I will love you more every day until I die. Nothing can stop that, so don't you dare tell me that I won't love you forever, that I can't know that. I know that, I know it better than anything."
At this point her tears were silent but profuse, and she did not even attempt to wipe them away. He stepped in, and she did not balk. She let herself be enveloped in his arms, sinking into his chest and resting her cheek against his shoulder. When she had stopped crying she pulled back and looked him in the face, and saw that he had been crying too, quietly, without notice.
He leaned down and she kissed him, not pulling away as before, but letting herself become immersed in the act, in the moment. Letting herself be loved.